The brouhaha about Lottie Dexter being unable to code is a red herring. Even if the UK’s best programmer were in her spot the concept of teaching programming en masse is doomed from the start. Most people don’t have the ability to deal with the kinds of abstractions that you need to program. This ability is one that can’t be acquired through hard work; you either have it or you don’t. Replace Dexter with someone—anyone—else and the program(me) will still be a failure.

Parentheses/pəˈrɛnθɨsiːz/ (singular, parenthesis/pəˈrɛnθɨsɨs/) (also called simply brackets, or round brackets, curved brackets, oval brackets, or, colloquially, parens/pəˈrɛnz/) contain material that could be omitted without destroying or altering the meaning of a sentence (in most writing, overuse of parentheses is usually a sign of a badly structured text)[according to whom?].